LOUISIANA: Fox Station Apologizes For Cutting Out Evolution Segment Of Cosmos

It was totally by accident. Via Raw Story:

A New Orleans Fox affiliate blames a technical glitch that interrupted Sunday’s episode of “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey.” WVUE-TV abruptly cut to a news promo, seat belt public service announcement, and commercials just as host Neil deGrasse Tyson was discussing how climate change millions of years ago influenced the primate-to-human evolutionary process. Commercials filled more than 5 minutes of airtime, interrupting 1 minute, 24 seconds of the program’s airtime, before “Cosmos” returned to a discussion on how the gravitational pull of other planets shaped Earth’s weather during the same period. WVUE’s vice president and general manager, Sandy Breland, described the glitch as “an automation error.”

An Oklahoma Fox station did something similar in March.

Funny Or Die: Creationist Cosmos

Neil deGrasse Tyson Trolls Creationists

"The Crab Nebula is about 6,500 light years from Earth. According to some beliefs, that’s the age of the whole universe, but if the universe were only 6,500 years old, how could we see light from anything more distant than the Crab Nebula? We couldn’t. To believe in a universe as young as 6,000 or 7,000 years old is to extinguish the light from most of the galaxy, not to mention the light from all the other hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe." - Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, in Sunday's episode of Cosmos, which focused on the speed of light.

Headline Of The Day

Details.

Bill Donohue Is Very Upset About Cosmos

Last night Fox debuted its 13-episode series, Cosmos; A Spacetime Odyssey, which is hosted by noted astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and is produced by Family Guy creator Seth McFarlane.  Catholic League blowhard Bill Donohue is very upset about the first episode, which shamefully depicted the Spanish Inquisition as a bad thing. 

The propagandists involved in this show, represented most conspicuously by Seth MacFarlane, told viewers last night that “the Roman Catholic Church maintained a system of courts known as the Inquisition and its sole purpose was to investigate and torment anyone who dared voice views that differed from theirs. And it wasn’t long before [Giordano] Bruno fell into the clutches of the thought police.” The ignorance is appalling. “The Catholic Church as an institution had almost nothing to do with [the Inquisition],” writes Dayton historian Thomas Madden. “One of the most enduring myths of the Inquisition,” he says, “is that it was a tool of oppression imposed on unwilling Europeans by a power-hungry Church. Nothing could be more wrong.” Because the Inquisition brought order and justice where there was none, it actually “saved uncounted thousands of innocent (and even not-so-innocent) people who would otherwise have been roasted by secular lords or mob rule.” (His emphasis.)

All that torture and disemboweling? Good thing! Cardinal Fang, fetch the comfy chair for Bill.